In the past decade, we have arrived at a strange impasse in the collective study of Judaism(s), Christianit(ies), and Islam(s). We live in a moment when many scholars of religion insist that the historical movements identified with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam cannot be grouped together into any sort of meaningful analytic category. At the same time, scholars of religion are producing more comparative work than ever on the overlaps and intersections between local iterations of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in various historical periods. As a field, it sometimes seems that we are frantically studying a phenomenon that we claim does not exist.
This talk argues that the category of Abrahamic traditions is a robust one, but we have been searching for its causes backwards. Rather than deriving from essential structural similarities, theological affinities, or shared origins, the category of Abrahamic religion has been produced slowly over the course of history by an ongoing relational constellation. In their centuries of rivalry over a shared imaginative space, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam evolved facing each other. As a result of this historical orientation towards rival traditions and their claims, practitioners of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have frequently developed shared local languages of religious imagination that have led practitioners to develop overlapping (if sometimes competing) concepts and rituals. This talk argues that this shifting kaleidoscope of different historical entanglements has left enduring traces of resemblance on these three traditions—and it is those residual commonalities that generate the category of Abrahamic as we perceive it.
